Sound—if self-promotional—advice on creating a sturdy organizational culture.
Two business consultants make the case for having a strong, principled corporate culture.
Hinton and debut author Yager draw on their own research and experience as they promote their firm’s disciplined approach to helping organizations transform their cultures and become “conscious” businesses. Despite the underlying sales pitch, their book could prove quite helpful to senior executives, beginning with its definition of a “Culture”—“that inexplicable element called energy that attracts customers to your stores or website.” The first chapter explains why it’s important to have a positive culture and what can happen if an organization has a toxic one. As examples of the harmful effects of dysfunction, the authors cite well-known organizations and their missteps—USA Gymnastics (sexual abuse convictions by the team doctor), the Catholic Church (pedophile priests), and Facebook (exposed user data)—along with a smaller number of positive cultures. Such missteps reflect the authors’ belief that “unconscious companies and organizations pay when their leaders’ thoughts and actions are corrupted by greed, self-indulgence, neglect, bad decision-making, arrogance and plain old stupidity.” The remainder of the book lays out the fundamentals of a positive culture, relying largely on concepts used by the authors’ the San Diego-based firm, CRI Global CAPS, which they plug frequently. Those concepts include the “Culture Spectrum” (a four-quadrant analysis of corporate cultures); “The Five Ps of Culture” (“Purpose,” “Principles,” “People,” “Processes,” and “Performance,” each covered in a separate chapter); and a “Culture Playbook,” a term the authors always italicize. The playbook is perhaps the most intriguing element; it uses the Five Ps to build “a roadmap for managing risk,” with an assessment of the organization’s culture as a first step. The book closes with “A Leader’s List of Conscious Business Principles,” 22 tips and observations that include “Encourage people to carry the message to the top, regardless of whether they bear good news or bad news.” Recommendations like “Share the credit when you succeed, but not the blame when you fail” may be overfamiliar to avid readers of guides for managers, but others may see them as needed reminders of the basics of good business practice.
Sound—if self-promotional—advice on creating a sturdy organizational culture.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9835032-7-9
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Blue Carriage Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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